I produce data, therefore I exist.

This is the era of big data, we are told. Data is the new oil, we read. There is data cleaning, data wrangling, even data lakes. Data Science. This is the era of information as commodity. This is the era where you are defined in a database, which in turn has replaced the archive and the collection. A database is actively used, constantly increased. A database is the mutating, ever-evolving material for knowledge. The multiverse? A database of variations of a data point. And data, in most of the images we see, is mechanical, cold, usually framed by the blueish tones and clean forms of the servers it is stored in. Never mind the tumultuous entanglement of cables hidden at the back. We produce data.

Therefore, if data is knowledge and knowledge is power, the vastness of Big Data even make some, as Yuri Harari does, to dismiss the possibility of a free will, as we contemplate that huge data amount and the consequent extraction of information and knowledge that makes us vulnerable to anyone in control of that data. How then, recover the management of data?

Of course this is not new. As Umberto Eco said, lists are at the beginning of everything, from census and catalogues. A creational myth began with the naming of things. Cataloguing, indexing the world became the keystone of sciences of information. We have information theory. This intention, powered by the development of computation created Big Data. But because they are at the beginning of everything, they are as well full of possibilities.

Where there is possibility there is ambiguity (as Borges explored and played in his famous list of an imaginary Chinese Encyclopedia). As cold as it may seem, data can be subjective too. Nicholas Feltron, an American designer created more than one decade ago the Feltron Report, made a name creating full pages of graphics tracing his yearly, down-to-earth routines: where he walked, who he met, what he drank.

It is in this vein that, to this contemporary idea of Big Data, Giorgia Lupi, a renowned Italian designer who lives in New York,for example opposes the idea of Small Data, data that is human-size, data that nevertheless fits our understanding. This data collection, when done on us by us-important detail- can led in this way to self awareness and self knowledge, something Lupi calls data humanism. By other ways, Posavec, an equally recognized artist and designer who is from US and lives in London, in a playful and handy-crafty way has arrived to the same conclusions in her work.

With a shared personal interest for gathering information and data visualization, together, they created back in 2013, the project called "Dear Data", a project where they send hand-drawn postcards to each other across the Atlantic, narrating their daily lives in codified schemes of data. They mapped their previously agreed topics.

The resulting work is a project, that has spanned across two books and courses and an acquisition of their work by the MoMA, shed a light into a often ignored dimension of data, a human one as opposed to the concept of Big Data, a data that is understandable, a data that can be grasped, that can be playful m that should not be feared, a data made of crayons, a data that have silly forms, colorful yet still maintains the internal logic of data processing, collecting, assorting, analyzing and displaying, without using complex algorithms or powerful software and in doing so capturing an essential tension of our times between our individual dimension and the massive gatherings of numbers and lists in anonymous servers across the world that are crunched and modeled to faceless models guiding the system that govern our societies whether willingly or not. Echo chambers, data appropriation, surveillance all of this social dimension, not new, are now showered in data.

Is to this space of ideas where Posavec and Lupi bring a surprisingly refreshing dimension making data approachable, understandable and graspable. In this they offer us a welcoming door to get grip of our ever-increasing complex daily lives and who knows, built more welcoming, creative, human realities upon the data structures of our days.

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Notes

1) Harari, Yuri. The myth of freedom. The Guardian, 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-harari-the-new-threat-to-liberal-democracy

2) Lupi, Giorgia. How we can find ourselves in Data. TED conference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFIDCtRX_-o and also in New York Public Library website. https://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/dear-data-giorgia-lupi-and-debbie-millman-design-and-style-series-event and https://media.nypl.org/audio/artists_2016_10_01_data.mp3

3) Sherri, Irvin. Contemporary Art is made our of rules thah mobilise us to act. https://aeon.co/essays/contemporary-art-is-made-out-of-rules-that-mobilise-us-to-act

4) MoMA. Dear Data in the MoMA collection https://www.moma.org/collection/works/215813

5) Lupi,,G and Posavec,,S. Dear Data Project. current website of the project: https://www.dear-data.com/

6) Lupi, Giorgia. Dear Data has been acquired by the MoMA https://medium.com/@giorgialupi/dear-data-has-been-acquired-by-moma-but-this-isnt-what-we-are-most-excited-about-bdaa3376d9db

6) Borges, Jorge Luis. The analytical language of John Wilkins https://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/155/assignment/ex1/Borges.pdf

7) Posavec S "People call me a poetic data designer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pceSOXCoSGk and "An Approach to UX and Data Viz" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNzKMVhx4SQ&t=10s

8) Rossen, R. Umberto Eco on why we love lists https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/umberto-eco-on-why-we-love-lists/266728/

9) Wilson, Mark. 10 years in the making, Nicholas Feltron files his final Feltron report. FastCompany https://www.fastcompany.com/3052301/10-years-in-the-making-nicholas-felton-files-his-final-feltron-report

10) Other articles I wrote on data: on data and its symbolic potential https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/data-symbol-german-fernandez/?trackingId=mxxaPBw3TtegUF6dsWyoOw%3D%3D and on communicational intention and information https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/ready-mades-ux-buttons-german-fernandez/?trackingId=mxxaPBw3TtegUF6dsWyoOw%3D%3D and on infographics as appareance https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/media-iconology-german-fernandez/?trackingId=hGCnhA4HRVKuqlLN8PeofA%3D%3D and some chronicles here https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/red-book-german-fernandez/?trackingId=y6TBuVk%2BReeY4OzsaeT%2FYA%3D%3D and of course a potpurri of quotes https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/60-quotes-information-graphics-german-fernandez/?trackingId=y6TBuVk%2BReeY4OzsaeT%2FYA%3D%3D